Musings about games, religion, politics, and other forms of entertainment.

Friday, January 12, 2007

Web 2.0

A funny thing happened to me within the last couple of weeks: I've become a raving disciple of Web 2.0. I'm now totally enamored of social networking information sites. The theory is that whereas the internet has given us the ability to all put up our own personal information sites, web 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia (and, of course, Iron Chariots) have begun generating massive amounts of user generated content to produce and catalog information on a scale never before achieved by human history.

It started when a coworker told me about del.icio.us, which is a site that should completely replace your browser's built-in bookmarking capability. This site allows you mark sites with tags that you can easily retrieve on any browser, from any computer, anywhere in the world. But also, you can easily share groups of bookmarks with friends (for example, here is my fledgling page of atheism links) and browse other people's tags to find other content that you would enjoy.

I'm already a regular participant in some 2.0 activities; obviously I have my own blog, and I've cofounded my own wiki. I also use reader.google.com to aggregate all my favorite blog and news feeds. Within just a few days of getting into del.icio.us, I also became an enthusiastic member of Digg (user-driven news alerts) and Plaxo (online contact manager). If you haven't checked out all these neato sites, then you're not geeky enough yet. :) And if you have, go ahead and ridicule me for being so far behind the curve.

In other news, next semester's classes start in a week. Awful to contemplate, but I'm sure I'll be wasting tons of break time visiting my online bookmarks.